The Moonee Valley Library Service has a great Pinterest account - with boards dedicated to staff picks, genres and local history. I particularly like their 'local writers' board which lists a whole range of works by people who either lived in or written about the Moonee Valley area. They have also linked most of the titles back to the library catalogue, so if you see something you like you can instantly see if it is available at your local library. The sad thing is that Pinterest just isn't as popular as many other social media platforms - and as such the Moonee Valley Library only has around 150 followers at this point in time.

I love the SLV twitter feed. It is constantly being updated with not only library news but general Melbourne arts news. The quality of their tweets is also very high and they use a variety of picture, videos, links and text to keep their audience interested. For example they had a whole lots of tweets about Cup Day, some historical photos and some practical information (like when the library would be open). It is also great for keeping up-to-date with events, however I sometimes find that it's a little bit short notice and that sometimes events are fully booked just after the event has been advertised via twitter (although I guess this is just what they wanted).

The UoM Library does a great job of promoting some of its resources and helpful study information while also tapping in to some pop-culture references. They seem to suffer from a similar problem to the Moonee Valley Pinterest in that they don't have as many followers as they probably should. Only 11 000 out of the hundreds of thousands of past and present students. This is a shame as it is one of the better University social media accounts.

I did briefly touch on some of the copyright issues that can arise when using social media in a previous post, but here is one dedicated entirely to what you can and can't do according to Australian Law.

If you are a content collector:

If you own a website that people contribute content to you cannot use posted content for your own purposes unless you have permission. This permission can be sought after the content is posted but generally websites will have a set of terms and conditions which the contributor must agree to before posting any content.

This also applies to allowing other people to use the content others have posted to your site.

One thing to be aware of as a content collector is that unless you specify otherwise in your terms and conditions, you will be responsible for anyone who contributes non-original content even if they do so unknowingly.

musicals works (which are separate from the sound recording or the lyrics); and

films, sound recordings, broadcasts and published editions.

However, this law can be overridden by the terms and conditions of the site you use to share them. As such it is very important to be aware of where you publish your content.

It is taking some time for copyright laws to catch up with web 2.0, and it is quite possible that it never will as the internet evolves so quickly.

Just about everything on the internet will have some sort of copyright breach attached to it - and it is almost impossible to seek the appropriate permissions at the rate that things are shared.

If you do want to upload a work that you have created it is best to state explicitly and in plain English who owns the copyright and whether you will allow the item to be copied or uploaded by other people.

Provide a link back to the original source and check that it is o.k. to use the content for your purposes. We are all guilty of copyright infringement on the net - I have no doubt that I have missed something on this blog even.

Referencing original content will lead to a higher quality of online material, something that will benefit us all!

Privacy and social media. It's a tricky area and something that we will probably keep hearing about for the foreseeable future. If I was to break it down I would say that it is not so much about what you share, but who you share it with.

It is the nature of the web that everything can be accessed by anyone - assuming they have the right tools to do so. But let's just think about social media on a small scale to begin with. Just what you and I would use in day-to-day life. Many social networking tools allow you to fiddle with your privacy settings. Most of the time you can decide who sees what you post: you can have secret groups on Facebook and private boards on Pinterest.

What you can't control, however, is what the people you do choose to share with then do with your information.

As soon as you click that button you are releasing a piece of information about yourself to the world. Perhaps one person you do know shares it, then someone they know sees it and alters it a little, and then it gets posted to a different platform and altered again.

Don't get me wrong, web 2.0 and this process of sharing has led to all sorts of fantastic things, but generally speaking these are organised and intended to 'go viral'.

So I guess there are two ways to deal with this:

Only share your personal information with people you are 100% sure won't do anything with that information.

and

If you're going to share things with the whole world do a double check and see if there is anyone in your life you wouldn't like to see it. Your boss? Grandmother? An identity thief? If you can think of one then just don't share it!

This guide from PC world gives you a few helpful and practical tips for different social media platforms. I think I will be going to review all my privacy settings right now!